A series of attacks on benign parenting resource Mumsnet took the site offline for several hours and appears to have compromised some user accounts via phishing methods, with a simultaneous hoax call also seeing armed police arrive at the home of the founder.

"On the night of Tuesday 11 August, Mumsnet came under attack from what's known as a denial of service (DDoS) attack. Our servers were bombarded with requests, which required our internet service provider to massively increase server capacity to cope. We were able to restore the site at 10am on Wednesday 12 August. Meanwhile a Twitter account, @DadSecurity, claimed responsibility, saying in various tweets "Now is the start of something wonderful", "RIP Mumsnet", "Nothing will be normal anymore" and "Our DDoS attacks are keeping you offline"."

And that's not the worst of it. The same person is assumed to have conducted a swatting attack -- the practise of making a prank call in order to have armed cops turn up at someone's house -- on the site's founder, and has been bragging about doing so under the now-suspended Twitter handle @DadSecurity.

The site's back up now, but is suggesting people change passwords -- even though admins don't believe the backend was hacked beyond the odd successful username/password phishing success. [Guardian]